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Category talk:Navy Personnel
I wonder if we should include career Naval personnel who are in one of the war sub-cats but also served before or after the war. I am thinking of people like Sam Carsten who continued to serve during the inter-war period while people like Enos Sr. and Jr. didn't and would not be double cated. ML4E (talk) 00:24, August 20, 2014 (UTC) :I worry it would get a bit sloppy and that visitors to the site wouldn't follow. There's also an inherent murkiness to drawing that distinction. For instance, you cite Enos the Younger as an example of someone who only served in the Navy in wartime, but his discharge didn't come till a few weeks after Partridge signed the Instrument of Surrender. And then there are all the minor characters that POVs meet along the way; most of the time we have no way of knowing when they joined the Navy or how long they stayed in after the POVs who covered them moved on. ::Well sure but implicit in wartime service is that individuals are not discharged immediately after the war ends. To use a soldiers example would be Squidface vs Armstrong Grimes. One of the last scenes had Squidface indicate he was considering going career while Armstrong saying he wanted out ASAP. Now, it does show a problem with my idea since Armstrong wasn't going anywhere for a while since the US was planning to keep a strong army to hold down the CS and so both would be considered soldiers post-GW2. :::This may just be an American thing but our DoD, and various independent veterans organizations that follow its lead, has always defined wartime and peacetime service extremely precisely. For instance there's a medal that's been awarded to all Cold War vets: If you were in any of the armed forces between 9/2/1945, when Shigemitsu and Umezu signed the surrender document on the Missouri, and 12/26/1991, when the Council of Republics officially declared the USSR dissolved, you got it. That includes any number of WWII draftees who were demobilized in the weeks following VJ Day and didn't do shit in the Cold War as we understand it, as well as some raw recruits who spent December of '91 in boot camp. By that definition, the war ended the day Partridge signed the instrument and anyone who wasn't out already was technically in the peacetime military. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:24, August 23, 2014 (UTC) :So we'd need to employ quite a few arbitrary judgment calls, probably in the majority of cases. I don't know if you're comfortable with that kind of hair-splitting, but I'm leery of it. Turtle Fan (talk) 05:19, August 21, 2014 (UTC) ::Judgement would be needed but I don't think it would be arbitrary. The older sailors, especially the Petty Officers and CPOs, would likely be career and so post-war while the younger ones talking about what they would do when the war was over would not. :::I guess that's a workable standard, but it would I think rely on a lot of incomplete information. We could take it for a test drive, I suppose; do it for one book's worth and of characters and see how workable it is. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:24, August 23, 2014 (UTC) ::However, I don't feel strongly about it but raise it as something to consider. ML4E (talk) 18:05, August 21, 2014 (UTC)